Scott Horton: Witnesses describe "clean-up" mission at Iraq detention facilities to destroy evidence

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

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December 6, 2007

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Let’s first focus on this question: Why is this evidence being destroyed? The answer is painfully acknowledged. The CIA leadership and other senior administration officials are fully cognizant of the fact that the use of a number of specific practices which these tapes almost certainly document, to-wit: waterboarding, long-time standing, hypothermia, psychotropic drugs and sleep deprivation in excess of two days, are serious crimes under American law and the law of almost all nations. Consequently, those who have used them and those who have authorized their use will almost certainly ultimately face criminal prosecution at some point in the future. The Administration’s attempts to immunize the perpetrators have failed. Any purported grant of a pardon by President Bush will be legally ineffective, because Bush himself is a collaborator in the scheme. And there is no statute of limitations. Therefore the prospect of prosecution is hardly far-fetched. It is a virtual certainty. So the evidence is being destroyed precisely because it would be used as evidence of criminal acts in a prosecution of administration figures and those acting under their direction. Therefore, this is a conscious, calculated obstruction of justice.


The second question is: Where has Congress been throughout this period? ..... The Associated Press now has a story up which raises even more troubling prospects. In it, General Hayden suggests that he notified Congressional oversight and they expressed no objection to the destruction of evidence. ..... Chairman Rockefeller has a different description of what happened from General Hayden:



Congresswoman Jane Harman also states unequivocally that she warned against destruction of the recordings.
The suggestion that the “CIA’s internal watchdog” viewed the tapes and approved in 2003 raises more questions. Does this “watchdog” understand its function as suborning criminality? It certainly looks that way. If it gave a green light, then it was complicit in a criminal act, and it needs to be the subject of an investigation itself.
But first let’s note: this was when John Yoo’s torture memorandum, issued out of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel in order to bind the CIA to the Yoo/Addington lunatic notions of torture, was in force. So that determination that they “were legal” is in fact John Yoo’s determination that they were “legal.” And this is as worthless a determination as has ever appeared within a rifleshot of the Potomac. Indeed, if that’s Hayden’s basis for saying it was legal, the proper reaction would not be to be reassured, it would be to be still more concerned.

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By destroying the evidence, the Bush Administration is laying the foundations for the use of torture-induced “evidence” in court room proceedings, in violation of U.S. law and international commitments. In fact we now have a number of witnesses saying that exactly this is in train, including a JAG colonel whose testimony before Congress Defense Department General Counsel (another of the prime torture conspirators) intervened to block. ..... Moreover, in Iraq in the period just before the investigation of Gen. Taguba was commenced, a number of witnesses have now described a special “clean up” mission that was sent through detention facilities, requesting that photos, recordings, records and documents be collected for destruction, to leave no evidence of the practices established there at the direction of Secretary Rumsfeld himself. Two generals have now described this “clean up.”

All of this is clear cut obstruction of justice, a serious federal crime.

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A major question hovers over the conduct of the Justice Department throughout this process. Nowhere does the Justice Department appear to behave like a law enforcement agency. If anything is has adopted the stance of a mobster’s consigliere, and some signs point to the Justice Department’s actual complicity in these criminal acts.

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